Dartz Wrote:"Kotono left a message to say I was supposed to find out more about where I was..."That line tickled my muse... I don't know whether you want to make this a scene or a side-story.
Quote:As so often happened during their evening duets, Shinji put down his bow at the end of a song. This particular song was the Beatles' The Long and Winding Road, a request from his partner, and he was pretty sure he knew why she had requested it. "I mentioned to Rhodes-san ... Ben-san ... that Kotono told me I should find out more about where I was, but I'm not sure he understood what she meant."--
Yayoi smiled. (For a brief moment, Shinji wondered whether Yayoi always smiled when somebody told her something.) "He probably didn't, Shinji-kun. As close as we are, there's still a fundamental gap between our two peoples."
"Humans and..." He didn't want to finish.
"I was thinking 'Nihonjin and Americajin,' actually. But neither of us are quite Nihonjin in the way the term's used here, are we?"
"I guess not."
She nodded. "So let's set that aside. Where is Ikari Shinji-kun? Right now, you're 1.2 meters to the left of my piano, but I doubt that's what Kotono-san meant, either."
He smiled at that, and suddenly thought he knew why Yayoi smiled so often. Then he had an idea. "Yayoi-san, where are you?"
"I was wondering when you were going to ask something like that. I can't answer that without telling you where I've been, so this is going to take a while. Let's leave the instruments here and go get some tea."
A few minutes later, they were sharing a bench outside the auditorium, a flask and two cups sitting between them. "Back in 2008, I woke up in a room I'd never seen before, with a man and three women I'd never seen before by my side. I smiled at them because somehow I knew they were my father and my sisters. That's how I came into this world."
"I woke up alone."
She didn't smile. "Oh, dear. But it took me months to stop being 'Fujisawa Yayoi, character from a terebi show' and start being 'Fujisawa Yayoi, person with interests outside of the archetype,' and even when I started being someone other that the girl in the show I was still a pilot for the longest time. You're making the change from 'character' to 'person' much faster than I did."
"What made you realize that you were changing, Yayoi-san?"
She thought for a moment. "It was about a year after I first woke up here. I heard about a group of people on Luna who were inviting people to join them, and what they were saying made a lot of sense to me even though it was nothing like what I'd experienced before. I didn't end up joining the Senshi, at least not officially, but I did give them some help when they needed it the most. That's why those girls called me 'Sailor Stellvia;' they insist that they're never going to forget how I set them on the path to where they are now. Which is silly, because all I did was buy them a few things and tell them something that they needed to hear."
Shinji though of how casually Yayoi had brought a Steinway and a Scarampella along on her visit to Frigga, and decided to ask someone else what the "few things" she had bought for the Senshi really were.
"But it wasn't until two years after that when I started doing things that the me in the story never did. That was when I asked my father to set up an astroball stadium."
"Astroball?"
"It's a sport, or a game, that people play in small spacecraft and with a large ball. You can find some matches on FenTube if you're really interested. But I had never been interested in sports before that, and there I was on the first really serious team - me, Cal from New Yavin, Minagi from Tsunami, Akuryua from Abliarsec, and J.B. Fargo from Genaros." She frowned. "I don't like Fargo any more."
He couldn't stop himself from asking, "What did he do?"
"He called me a sexaroid! To my face, no less!"
Shinji relaxed a bit. "Why?"
"People had just found out that my sister Sora - I told you about her already - is an AI, and Fargo jumped to the conclusion that I was an AI as well."
"You are an AI."
"Yes, but he didn't have any proof. And then he assumed that anyone who was built instead of born was ... well, not a 'real' person." She took a deep breath. After a moment, she went on, more calmly. "I slapped him, of course."
"I can't imagine you slapping anybody."
"It's the only time I've ever slapped anyone. Then Cal took Fargo aside, and I don't know what happened. I only ever saw Fargo once after that, when he gave back the keys to his astroball ship."
"I think I'd rather be like Cal-san than Fargo."
Yayoi nodded. "Cal Calrissian is a very good man, and a good friend. The only thing I wish he'd do is stop asking to have sex with me. I've told him that I'm not interested in men that way."
Shinji's eyebrows went up. "You're a ...?"
"The word you're looking for is 'lesbian,' and yes. I'm also in love with a woman named Ginny who loves me for who and what I am, and that's all I'm going to say about our private life." She raised her voice. "So don't even bother asking, Mackie."
"Is he listening to us?"
"Maybe, maybe not." She pointed quickly at an intercom on the wall. "But I wouldn't put it past him to have a system daemon scanning the intercoms for particular keywords and recording conversations that interest him."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because we do that on Stellvia. Not for gossip about people's sex lives, but for advance warning of possible threats to the station. Everybody who lives in manufactured space stations does that, ever since the incident on Over The Rainbow."
"Incident?"
"I'd rather not talk about that right now. You asked where I am, and that isn't part of my story. Let's see... I've told you about my sisters, I've told you about the Senshi, I've mentioned Cal and Ginny. But I haven't mentioned A.C. yet."
"I remember Jet mentioning somebody named A.C. Peters."
Yayoi nodded. "That's the same person. She built my body. I get a lot of my forthrightness from A.C. and her immediate family. She's strong, determined, very intelligent, and ... well, she has a few problems, but doesn't everybody?" She stopped for a moment, then continued, "And I can't forget about Leda-san. She's smart, and strong-willed, and a Senshi, but most of all she's my father's wife and the mother of my flesh-and-blood sister Helen."
"You have a complicated family, Yayoi-san."
She smiled. (Again.) "Yes, I do. And I haven't even mentioned the sisters that Noah built on his own, after The Girls visited." She noticed him notice the capital letters. "The Girls had a big effect on me, too. They're not from around here, and I have no way of following them to where they came from, as much as I wish I could. And I want to follow them so much ..."
Shinji realized that this was the first time he'd ever seen Yayoi cry. He had no idea what to do.
It took Yayoi a few minutes to regain her composure. "But that door is forever closed to me. I know now that their biggest effect on me happened after they left, and Noah started building more of my sisters. He was so busy with them, neglecting work, that somebody had to run the business - and that somebody was me. I hated it at first. I was stuck behind a desk and wasn't flying very much. But then I discovered I had a talent for working with other people, and, well, here I am - vice-president of one of the largest trading companies in space."
Shinji whistled. "You're that important a person? And you're still spending every evening playing music with me?"
She nodded. "You're an important person, too, Shinji-kun. We care about you - as a person, not as a character from a story - and we want to help you succeed. We're just showing you some possibilities and waiting for you to tell us what you want to succeed at." Yayoi's smile turned into a grin. "And you're helping me take the first vacation I've had in three years, so don't start thinking that you owe me anything."
He stood up. "That's a lot to take in, Yayoi-san."
"And I left out quite a lot, including how we met Yuu-san. Would you like to play anything else this evening?"
He shook his head. "Right now, I want to go think about things. Good night, Yayoi-san."
"Good night, Shinji-kun... Shinji-san."
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012